Resource efficient manufacturing: can reduced energy efficiency lead to improved sustainability?

Panel: 2. Sustainable production design and supply chain initiatives

This is a peer-reviewed paper.

Authors:
Sanober Hassan Khattak, Institute of Energy and Sustainable Development (IESD), De Montfort University, United Kingdom
Vishal Sardeshpande, Center of Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas (CTARA), India
Richard Greenough, Institute of Energy and Sustainable Development,
De Montfort University, United Kingdom

Abstract

Industrial sustainability has been defined as ‘the conceptualisation, design and manufacture of goods and services that meet the needs of the present generation while not diminishing economic, social and environmental opportunity in the long term’. This is not necessarily the same as industrial energy efficiency, although the two concepts are both desirable goals and are clearly related.

Industrial sustainability implies significantly reducing the consumption of non-renewed exergy stock. To illustrate this, a jaggery (sugar) production process is described from energy and exergy perspectives. Modifications were made to the process to improve process efficiency based on an energy analysis. The base case and the modified case are compared using exergy analysis based on the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

If the process is viewed as part of an integrated industrial system for which resource efficiency is the goal, the modifications required to minimise exergy destruction differ from what is required to maximise energy efficiency. This study highlights a possibility that increasing the local system efficiency may have a negative impact on the global system’s resource consumption. These results provide an insight into how the design of industrial systems according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics can help to improve resource efficiency in furnace processes in the context of industrial ecology.